The shadow chancellor’s lecture had something old, something new, and something green. When last January I spoke to a host of former and current Treasury officials and advisers about the criteria for the role of shadow chancellor, and asked them to name possible candidates, Dodds was one of...

The Egyptian government seems more interested in suppressing negative coverage and maintaining the illusion of control than tackling the country’s healthcare crisis. A camera pans around a hospital ward, showing unmoving bodies atop hospital beds. They’re all dead, says the man shooting the...

As the cost of offshore wind power has been driven down by Europe and China, companies in the US are planning enough capacity to power millions of homes. Americans owe Europe a thank you. Two decades ago, Germany’s new renewable energy feed-in tariff stimulated the market for rooftop solar...

Until there is firm scientific evidence we should avoid overblown claims about near-magical substances. If there’s one thing you can rely on in this pandemic, it’s this: at least once a month there’ll be a new article in the media arguing that vitamin D helps prevent Covid-19. The case is...

Defending civil liberties was once a defining principle of the left, so why has the term been co-opted to mean unbridled individualism? The frequent appeals to personal liberty made by anti-maskers and lockdown sceptics make a depressing addition to the Covid debate for anyone on the left...

The US could yet fall apart under the strain of its structural racism and the dysfunctionality of its capitalism. Like grease from an old stove, the Nazis of the US are suddenly getting scoured off social media. Donald Trump’s Twitter account is gone. Parler has been scrubbed from the Amazon...

Watson’s Little Scratch, Machell’s The Unusual Suspect, Peters’ Detransition, Baby and S Glaude Jr’s Begin Again. Little Scratch by Rebecca Watson This debut novel is strikingly experimental, but reading it feels completely natural. Watson narrates a single day in the mind of a...

Presenter and anatomist Alice Roberts describes the series as a time-travelling tour of how anatomical knowledge has changed . Today, we know a lot about our own bodies, and we take that knowledge for granted. I have always known that my brain is where my cognitive functions happen...

Its excitements lay not in revisiting John Cooper’s inexplicably horrible crimes, but in building a case, bit by bit, against the clock. True crime can be so cheap: voyeuristic, cruel and ultimately futile. Some things are beyond comprehension, no matter what those involved might say about...

It was tapestry, not landscape painting, that first brought the outdoors indoors. Long before there were landscape paintings to hang on the wall, the bucolic had already crept inside. Anglo-Saxon homes are recorded as having been hung with wah hrà gel or wah rift - wall coverings - and...

Porter’s tribute to Bacon is a short work, dense with allusions, somewhere between a prose-poem and a play script. Francis Bacon was very particular about the way his works were displayed. He chose theatrical gold frames and decreed that the paintings themselves - the brushwork that slips,...

She changed popular music forever, but the Mother of the Blues is not the household name she deserves to be. Netflix’s recent star-studded release, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, adapted from the Pulitzer-winning dramatist August Wilson’s 1982 play, brings one of the US’s first professional...

Guha, one of India’s best-known historians and public intellectuals, is a bona fide cricket obsessive. Early on in this delightful memoir, Ramachandra Guha recounts the first time he shook hands with a Test cricketer. It was the summer of 1970 and Guha was 12 years old at the time. The...

Why the age of Augustus still transfixes us. The collapse of the Roman republic, and the establishment amid its rubble of the rule of the Caesars, constitutes the primal political narrative of the West. In 49 BC, a system of government founded on the conviction that the only conceivable...

This column - which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s Richard II , refers to the whole of Britain - has run in the NS since 1934. Out on a limb Fans of HG Wells have expressed annoyance at a new commemorative 2 coin honouring the author. The coin features a Martian machine from...

The race to provide Covid-19 protection is on, but halting. The vulnerable will need to maintain their guard for a good while yet. Frank rang, concerned about his wife. She’s coming out with some very strange things, he told me. Sometimes she doesn’t even know where she is. How long’s...

Email emily.bootle newstatesman.co.uk if you would like to be the New Statesman’s Subscriber of the Week. What do you do? Retired social care provider. Where do you live? Just outside Norwich. Do you vote? Always. How long have you been a subscriber? Six years, maybe longer. ...

The theoretical physicist on the political ideals of Alexander Bogdanov and why he would fail if he competed in Mastermind. Carlo Rovelli was born in Italy in 1956. He was politically active as a student and detained in 1987 for refusing military service. He is a theoretical physicist and...

The view from the window is of much nicer houses opposite - or would be if the glass weren’t, in winter, permanently dripping with condensation. And so the new lockdown begins. Once more, the radical change to the lifestyle of your columnist. Staying in all day becoming a virtue again, rather...

As fireworks lit up London’s skyline, I thought of us all in the city below watching from our separate spaces. New Year’s Eve has never been my favourite night of the year. When I was young I remember wanting something transformative to happen - a wildly attractive stranger A life...

Every cloud has a silver lining, and Hungarian Furmint is something we can all enjoy. Before I found Furmint, the Hungarians I loved were mostly monochrome photographers. Perhaps because their language relates to no other in Europe (except, faintly, to Finnish), many émigrés took up cameras...

The argument for making Twitter and other social media sites accountable for their content is compelling - and the solution could be charging users to post. It is all very well for Twitter to ban Donald Trump after years of profiting from the millions of eyes drawn towards his frequently...

The novelist and screenwriter discusses science fiction, the human soul and working with Steve McQueen on the BBC’s Small Axe series. Courttia Newland was in his mid-twenties when he had his first out-of-body experience. Following the publication of his debut novel, The Scholar (1997), he...

With 20 wins from 22 games, Gerrard has swept away the team’s culture of mediocrity. A couple of years ago, his own career at Liverpool long behind him, Steven Gerrard returned to Anfield as a spectator. It was the second leg of the Champions League semi-final, and Liverpool were 3-0 down to...

The party of Trump is angry, and their rage will only intensify in the build-up to Joe Biden’s inauguration. On Wednesday 6 January, the day Congress held its ceremonial counting of the electoral college votes, a violent group of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building. They had come to...

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster. The Welshman who Joe Biden once hailed as his greatest speech writer is to celebrate the 46th US president’s inauguration at home with a cup of tea and slice of his daughter’s banana cake. Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock quipped that...

Joe Biden’s gains in low-density, semi-rural residential communities is a story of spatial realignment, and also of political realignment among classes, ethnicities and religions. Among the surprises of the 2020 US presidential election was its unusual geography. Donald Trump, though defeated,...

The task of the president-elect’s inauguration speech is, as Lincoln said in 1865, to bind up the nation’s wounds . The early drafts of John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, written by Ted Sorensen, bear the scribbles of the president himself. Read the other presidential inaugurals, ...

The conviction of Trump would require Republican Senators to decide that they’re no longer afraid of his supporters. President Donald Trump made history on Wednesday, becoming the only US president to be impeached twice after the House of Representatives voted 232-197 in favour. If this...

Since catching coronavirus, any food that doesn’t taste of sawdust or disgustingly bitter has become a great luxury. I have never been much smitten reading the electoral views of music stars or business sages. The little vignettes are largely guff - and not to be confused with the insights of...

Twitter and Facebook’s action against Donald Trump shows why the tech giants should no longer enjoy the privileges of being publishers without the responsibilities. After Donald Trump lost the US presidency last year, he retained the consolation prize of his Twitter account. Commentators...

Dubbed Nijinsky, after the champion racehorse, by Manchester City team-mates and fans, the unparalleled footballer was a modest man with an immodest gift. Nijinsky they dubbed him at Manchester City, after the champion racehorse, although his team-mates might also have been nodding towards...

We have experienced a tiny taste of the kind of mortality that was once inevitable. It’s rare for historical trends to follow a straightforward narrative of progress, but life expectancy was, until recently, one of the few exceptions. In England and Wales in 1841, life expectancy was 40.2 for...

As a junior doctor walking into the intensive care unit for the first time, I saw a ward lined with unconscious patients attached to ventilators, and the gravity of the pandemic suddenly hit me. On the morning of Friday 13 March, I opened an email from my university, ordering me to take the...

The storming of the Capitol on 6 January was not a coup. But American democracy is still in danger. A number of prominent commentators, including the historians Timothy Snyder and Sarah Churchwell, the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright and the Berkeley public policy professor...

At every stage the Prime Minister has acted too late, and now hospitals are bearing the consequences. Battling the coronavirus pandemic is ultimately a test of a state’s capacity for delayed gratification: the actions you take now will only begin to have an effect in a couple of weeks’ time....

Keir Starmer has called for a tougher lockdown, and five other things we learned at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions 1. Keir Starmer has called for a tougher lockdown Much ridiculed by the Prime Minister for being Captain Hindsight , and even considered by some in his party to be...

There is no case for food parcels instead of cash as an effective means of lifting people out of poverty. Who’s to blame for the meagre state of England’s food parcels? Pictures of inadequate parcels containing bruised bananas, half-portions of peppers wrapped in cling film and tiny portions...

In this story of a home birth gone wrong, director Kornél Mundruczó and screenwriter Kata Wéber reach for effects without quite knowing how to achieve them. Extended cinematic takes of the kind popularised recently by 1917, Birdman and Victoria place the burden on a director and...

The coming struggle against Trump and Trumpism. In the early hours of Wednesday 6 January, Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church - Martin Luther King’s former congregation - was elected as one of two senators for Georgia. It was the first time a Democrat had...

Drunk Tank Pink is, in many ways, a typical second rock album in that it reflects on the madness caused by the first. You’ve got to wonder where Shame find the energy. From the opening bars of Alphabet , where Charlie Forbes’s pummelling drums reintroduce a furious urgency, to album closer ...

Angela Merkel’s incremental progressivism drew strong support from women and migrants. Can her successor retain them? A big year looms in German politics. Angela Merkel is stepping down after 16 years as chancellor. On 16 January her Christian Democrat Union (CDU) will pick a new leader. Then,...

A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email letters newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine. At 79, I calculate I was the 7,600,001st person in the vaccine queue after NHS staff, care workers and the more than 3 million over...

27 October 1978: On the precariousness of friendship between writers. In this 1978 piece, the author and academic Malcolm Bradbury considered two recent publications - Scott and Ernest by Matthew J Bruccoli (Bodley Head) and Ernest Hemingway and His World by Anthony Burgess (Thames &...

Seabeds hold the key to our understanding of climate change, but remain largely undocumented. The ocean covers 71 per cent of the earth’s surface, but it is still something we know relatively little about. An oft-cited statistic in ocean science is that over 80 per cent of the ocean floor, an...

Officials believe they are locked in a race against time to ramp up vaccination capacity while limiting the spread of the new variant as much as possible. The new UK variant of the coronavirus, estimated to be around 60 per cent more transmissible than previous forms of the virus, has spread...

Why have the tech giants waited until now to curb the promotion of ideas that lead to violence? On 6 January, as the world watched rioters break into the US Capitol building brandishing guns, knives, and zip ties, social media companies began to panic. The attack had been planned, organised,...

When compared to the rest of the G20, the UK’s current daily average of 933 deaths is the worst. The UK is, by most measures, faring worse than other countries in managing the Covid-19 pandemic, with one of the highest total and current death rates in the world. More than 80,000 people have...

A private caterer has admitted falling short as photos circulate on social media of woeful meal provision for poorer pupils. Two potatoes, one tin of baked beans, eight single cheese slices, two carrots, three apples, two bananas, one small bag of penne, one tomato, three Frubes, two...

1 July 1963: The brutal reality of Liverpool in the early 1960s. In this report from Liverpool from 1963, John Morgan found himself bewildered by the city. He found a mixture of poverty, violence, sectarianism and occasionally nihilism that was unlike anywhere else in the country. The new ...